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Explore content from blog posts to technical white papers gathered together for your convenience. All written by Altium's community of PCB design experts.

31:18 Altium Designer Productivity: Jump Start your Altium Designer Projects Creating a new PCB project in Altium Designer can be quite a bit of work, especially if you want all Watch Video
1:25:04 PCB Design Best Practices: Routing Techniques in Altium Designer Explore methods for advanced routing in this presentation with expert Mike Creeden of San Diego PCB and David Marrakchi. View Watch Video
41:17 Thermal Analysis & Electrical Stress Derating Integrated in Altium Designer Imagine that you are at a ski site and you seat on a ski lift, which can carry a max Watch Video
45:02 Multichannel Design in Altium Designer Do you need eight identical A/D converters on one PCB? Or do you have several similar DDR3 memory banks on Watch Video
1:21:20 PCB Design Best Practices: Advanced Stack-Up in Altium Designer View the presentation slides: Sign up to pre-register for AltiumLive next year or try Altium Designer today. Watch Video
2019 Five Tech Predictions — The Decade of Disruption We’re coming in for a wild ride in 2019. The last few years have been pretty crazy, and 2019 looks to continue to amplify this highly innovative and disruptive trend. While some may be nervous about trends in technology such as artificial intelligence, I'm still quite optimistic. The most long-term successful aspects of our civilization are those that rip apart on a regular basis. Frequent disruption allows for people to start anew and create Read Article
Student Rocket Team Oronos Polytechnique Shoots for the Stars with PCB Designs In this interview I talk with Nathanael Beaudoin-Dion, Avionics lead for the Oronos Polytechnique Rocket team from Polytechnique Montreal Technical University. Each year in June, Oronos competes in the Spaceport America Cup, the world’s largest rocketry competition which takes place in New Mexico at the only commercial spaceport in the world. Enjoy this article as well as the photos of their rockets and videos from this inspiring team. Judy Read Article
Draftsman: What’s New in Altium Designer 19 Draftsman® has been a valuable asset to designers since Altium Designer 16. Although some users may have found it to be incomplete due to their unique board requirements, Draftsman has helped many designs go to production. Since its introduction Draftsman has evolved more and more into what it is today: a robust, stable, and powerful PCB drawing tool, specifically made to help designers automate their fabrication and assembly drawing process Read Article
OnTrack Newsletter: Why Use a Service Bureau? Multilayer Design Tips, Steps to a Good Design Release - January 2019 OnTrack Newsletter JANUARY 2019 VOL. 2 No 9 “AT YOUR SERVICE” Insights from a PCB Design Service Bureau Companies and design teams look to professional PCB design service providers to support their product development for a variety of reasons. In this article, we talk with Scott Miller, CEO of Freedom CAD, about what dynamics, benefits, and potential concerns come into play when contracting with a design service provider. READ FULL ARTICLE TRICKS Read Article
The Implications of Going Fileless A few weeks ago, we covered the general advantages of switching from a desktop-based environment to the cloud for collaboration. Emails can get lost. Attachments can be deleted or forgotten. Merging multiple changes is difficult. The cloud addresses all of those challenges in collaboration. Now, we talked a lot about files and the challenges that come with them in that post. Frankly, the issues in that post are relevant to almost any scenario Read Article
PCB Design Tips for SRAM Users: How to Prevent Data Loss SRAM loses its data when power is removed. One of the best inventions in editing software is the autosave feature, which prevents Murphy’s Law from striking at the worst time. Decades ago, I nearly cried when several pages of an important university assignment were literally wiped out, as the non-existence of the autosave feature was made worse by my reluctance to hit the ‘Save’ button. In electronics, you risk losing the entire data stored in a Read Article
How to Design With a DP83848C Ethernet PHY In my university days, high-speed internet was non-existent. Online gaming was often limited to Starcraft or Warcraft, played over the Local Area Network (LAN). Friends would gather and start battling each other from different computers within a house, with cries of victories reverberating through the walls. It’s possible to be an awful Warcraft player and still design great PCBs. However, if you fail to understand the LAN and its underlying Read Article
Take Charge of Your PCB Design with This Bill of Material Software Free Trial New Year’s resolutions are often the focus of humor as people admit that they are difficult to keep. The old joke is; “last year I resolved to lose 15 pounds, only 20 more to go.” The important thing about resolutions though is that they show that you are taking charge of something in your life. Diet, exercise, learning, or whatever, the point is that you have seen something that needs to change and you are committing yourself to make it happen Read Article
Looking Forward What to Expect After Switching from OrCAD In my collection of tools out in the garage, I have a pair of tin snips that are far older than I am. I inherited this tool from my father, and it may be 80 years old for all I know. These tin snips are difficult to use because they’ve become dull and loose due to their age, but it was hard for me to make a change because they had belonged to my dad. The tin snips frustrated me to no end, so I would find ways to work around them. Finally, after Read Article
The Need To Control Routing Impedance coa The design approach of controlled impedance routing is a key ingredient of high speed PCB design, in which effective methods and tools must be adopted to ensure the intended high speed performance for your PCBs. So unless you carefully design your routes within your PCB, the impedance would be uncontrolled, and its value would vary from point to point throughout the trace. And because your PCB traces don’t act like simple connections at high Read Article
Weekly Digest: New Content from Altium In this article, we’ve collected everything published this week to share learning opportunities and insights for our users and followers. Those of you who know Altium, know that you can count on us to provide resources for growth and development in the PCB Design industry. Those of you who are new to our resources - welcome! Get ready to expand your knowledge. AltiumLive Munich AltiumLive Munich brought together experts from different industries Read Article
Pipelining Your Design File Process with Manufacturing Output Files An effective PCB design process requires that every step be mapped out and connected together so that the data flows through the design naturally. This type of data management is also known as “pipelining,” and its intention is to guarantee that the design data moves systematically from step to step without any interruption. With advances in today’s PCB design tools the first part of pipelining PCB design data, the component selection process Read Article